Woah. Hold on there. Halo: CE and COD4 were very VERY good games. They probably easily crack the top 50 if not top 25.

Halo: CE isn't very replayable.

I've been staying out of these threads for a reason, but I had a pretty good talk the other day about Halo and why it's not what it used to be.

Basically, Halo came from an era in shooters where two practices were very common in FPS games: A) Stupidly huge health bars, and B) no aiming down the sights. For cripe's sake just look at the assault rifle. It's got a magazine of 60 fucking bullets and you had to spit pretty much the whole thing at a dude to actually kill him. Nowadays, most shooters hold the exact opposite standards, which makes Halo and it's derivatives seem like much stranger games in comparison. Which they are.

However, Halo did that formula better than anything else at the time, and in several ways mastered that specific genre of shooters. The problem is that the genre never changed, and shooters are doing fairly innovative things. I guess Halo 4's coming out in the same, tired-out formula though so who knows if that'll be any fun. Here's hoping I'm wrong.

I think the Halo games are brilliant- they're the modern successors to Doom and Quake, full of the whole strafey, jumpy, rocket-y fun filled, colorful FPS.

I have never like the Half-Life series- it's very well done, but feels poorly planned- kind of like a bunch of devs sat down in a room and were like "hey guys, this is cool, LETS ADD IT!" and just slapped together a big-budget game with no real idea of what they were doing. Maybe that's why they are taking so long making the third?

Keldoclock wrote:I think the Halo games are brilliant- they're the modern successors to Doom and Quake, full of the whole strafey, jumpy, rocket-y fun filled, colorful FPS.

I have never like the Half-Life series- it's very well done, but feels poorly planned- kind of like a bunch of devs sat down in a room and were like "hey guys, this is cool, LETS ADD IT!" and just slapped together a big-budget game with no real idea of what they were doing. Maybe that's why they are taking so long making the third?

That's Half-Life 2, which is in all senses of the word, a terrible fucking game.

The original half-life from 1998 is an insanely well-planned and developed game. I recently played through Black Mesa (which is the exact same game but on a modern engine and also available FOR FREE so go download it), and was reminded that I find Half-Life to be the definitive first-person storytelling experience. The game escalates from "just another day at the research lab " to an astoundingly horrifying lab accident in seconds, and the accident then keeps escalating to a full-scale alien invasion, which becomes a military cover-up operation that goes completely out of control and escalates into absolute and total warfare. You play a scientist at ground-zero and are forced to fight your way out of this mess, for the sole purpose of survival. The perspective of the entire unfolding situation as the commandos at first target you as threat #1 for being one of the scientists actually competent enough to take down squads of marines becomes a harrowing experience as they ambush you and insulting you by name (since they've done their homework and looked up your bio because you fucking work there), but rapidly lose the resources to pursue you or even hold a perimeter as alien warships start appearing in the skies makes for a cramped and scary game where you spend almost the entirety of time alone, with two armies trying to find and kill you. Think Dead Space, but in 1998.

Half-life 2 decides to randomly implant that same character 20 years after the aliens invaded earth and has him lead a resistance movement to overthrow the alien overlords.

I've actually been thinking about how I feel about this series for a while now. It used to be my favourite game series, but there's one thing that's throwing me off about it now. They've put so much detail into making the characters human, and they've done a fantastic job with them.They give them all this emotional depth, and show them coping with the possibility of losing one another, but then you get to the actual gameplay. KILL KILL KILL. It's just really freaking weird to put so much work into making characters believable, only to have them mow down an entire army without stopping to think about it. In all the greatness of its storytelling, that's a big flaw.

I'm expecting the final game to reveal that all the main characters (including the villains) are delusional psychopaths, and all the foot soldiers are just trying to save their own lives from their insane boss and even more insane treasure hunters.

I should not the part at the end of Uncharted 2, where Lazarevic says "how many men have you killed today?" and then follows it up by saying that Drake doesn't have the will to shoot him. Then Drake's just like "you're right, I don't." WTF? He can murder hundreds of people no problem, but he can't shoot the guy who's been fucking him over the entire time?

Oh yeah no, Nathan Drake is absolutely a mass-murderer. I too find it a little stunning how brutal he can be with his kills - sure, most of them are in self-defense cause the guy's shooting at him with an AK, but how does he go to sleep at night when he thinks about the hundreds of people he's pulled off of ledges and thrown to their unsuspecting doom?

IVhorseman wrote:Oh yeah no, Nathan Drake is absolutely a mass-murderer. I too find it a little stunning how brutal he can be with his kills - sure, most of them are in self-defense cause the guy's shooting at him with an AK, but how does he go to sleep at night when he thinks about the hundreds of people he's pulled off of ledges and thrown to their unsuspecting doom?

I've actually played through the Uncharted 2 campaign a few times using only the tranquillizer gun. Not just because it's non-lethal, but because it's short-ranged but silent, which means you're forced to play very differently.

I guess? The alien planet 3d platforming and weird railway tunnel sequences kind of ruin it for me.... They're like the Cortana level in Halo where you just keep wishing it would end already so you can get back to the game.

Seriously, that fucking level. You travel via literally sphinters and at the hardest fight in the level the devs are like "yeah alright, give him an energy sword with 20% battery and no ammo for 20 minutes beforehand"

The Cortana level is great fun with a friend when one of you has a shotgun and the other dual wield plasma rifles! ROOM BREACHIN BIATCH. It's really nice, hopping around and causing carnage all around you.